Angela Dufresne
Angela Dufresne is a painter, teacher and occasional writer who has shown her work in the U.S. and Europe since 1993. She has been the subject of twenty-three solo exhibitions and participated in over 100 group shows. Dufresne’s “work articulates non-paranoid, porous ways of being in a world fraught by fear, power and possession. Through painting, drawing and performative works, she wields heterotopic narratives that are both non hierarchical and perverse” (angeladufresne.org).
Maritza Ranero or Kiss the Cunt of God
2018, 72 x 66 Inches, oil on canvas
Dufresne’s paintings exuberantly weave imagery, narrative, paint, and visceral pleasure. She refers to the work as examples of non-paranoid, porous ways of being in the world. Delivered with absurdity, affection and feminist vibrato, Dufresne presents figurative articulations that feverously emerge out of the paint. Humorous, giddy, vulnerable, non-heroic, perverse, her figures revel in their destabilized relationship to their environments. Her subjects are nether man nor nature, form or formless, but allow for both to coexist in their lack of selfhood and their openness to absorb, fuse with, metabolize the world around them. In cinematic dissolves they conjure up the centrality, the ontology of humanity, as challenged. Deft in techniques of revision, erasure, overlay and addition, Dufresne deploys empathy and humor with equal parts skill and sensitivity in a commitment to painting’s ability to present, transgress and reconfigure experience and representation. (Guggenheim Foundation)
Perfect In Every way Except No Nose
2013, oil on canvas, 24 x 28 inches
See Hyperallergic for more on Dufresne:
”Beer with a Painter: Angela Dufresne”
”Angela Dufresne Queers the Portraiture Tradition”